Thursday, March 25, 2010

Here is pleasure; drink it down.
Here is sorrow; drain it dry.
Tilt the goblet, don’t ask why.
Here is madness; down it goes.
Here’s a dagger and a kiss,
Don’t ask what the reason is.
Drink your liquor, no one knows;
Drink it bravely like a lord.
Do not roll a coward eye,
Pain and pleasure is one sword
Hacking out your destiny;
Do not say, "It is not just."
That word won’t apply to life;
You must drink because you must;
Tilt the goblet, cease the strife.
Here at last is something good,
Just to warm your flagging blood.
Don’t take breath —
At the bottom of the cup
Here is death: Drink it up.

Saturday, March 20, 2010

Poetry is the supreme fiction, madame.
Take the moral law and make a nave of it
And from the nave build haunted heaven. Thus,
The conscience is converted into palms,
Like windy citherns hankering for hymns.
We agree in principle. That's clear. But take
The opposing law and make a peristyle,
And from the peristyle project a masque
Beyond the planets. Thus, our bawdiness,
Unpurged by epitaph, indulged at last,
Is equally converted into palms,
Squiggling like saxophones. And palm for palm,
Madame, we are where we began. Allow,
Therefore, that in the planetary scene
Your disaffected flagellants, well-stuffed,
Smacking their muzzy bellies in parade,
Proud of such novelties of the sublime,
Such tink and tank and tunk-a-tunk-tunk,
May, merely may, madame, whip from themselves
A jovial hullabaloo among the spheres.
This will make widows wince. But fictive things
Wink as they will. Wink most when widows wince.

Friday, March 19, 2010

The tenebrous sky
Was founded on lightning,
And there came marching
To a funeral,
A multitude so millioned
That number was unthinkable;
There were massed together
Kings pierced with their sceptres,
Tyrants shod with the points of swords,
And priests each with a live coal
In the palm of his hand,
Learned men
With book-yokes on their necks,
Merchants with gold eyelids;
Each one tortured with his symbol
And an innumerable host
Without sign or distinction;
Each bore a tuft of grass
In his fingers;
The grass was in seed,
And as they walked,
The seed fell where it listed.
There was no sound
As the host marched
To the funeral;
But what was buried
Was far in the Past,
And the host poured up
From the Future.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Friend, though thy soul should burn thee, yet be still.
Thoughts were not meant for strife, nor tongues for swords.
He that sees clear is gentlest of his words,
And that's not truth that hath the heart to kill.
The whole world's thought shall not one truth fulfil.
Dull in our age, and passionate in youth,
No mind of man hath found the perfect truth,
Nor shalt thou find it; therefore, friend, be still.
Watch and be still, nor hearken to the fool,
The babbler of consistency and rule:
Wisest is he, who, never quite secure,
Changes his thoughts for better day by day:
To-morrow some new light will shine, be sure,
And thou shalt see thy thought another way.

Saturday, March 13, 2010

The man in shades
strides to the mic
and declares,
"Only the lonely
know the way I feel tonight ..."
– and ten thousand screaming,
chanting fans wedged up against
each other in the hall all together
suddenly feel so
lonely.

Saturday, March 6, 2010

Surely among a rich man's flowering lawns,
Amid the rustle of his planted hills,
Life overflows without ambitious pains;
And rains down life until the basin spills,
And mounts more dizzy high the more it rains
As though to choose whatever shape it wills
And never stoop to a mechanical
Or servile shape, at others' beck and call.

Mere dreams, mere dreams! Yet Homer had not sung
Had he not found it certain beyond dreams
That out of life's own self-delight had sprung
The abounding glittering jet; though now it seems
As if some marvellous empty sea-shell flung
Out of the obscure dark of the rich streams,
And not a fountain, were the symbol which
Shadows the inherited glory of the rich.

Some violent bitter man, some powerful man
Called architect and artist in, that they,
Bitter and violent men, might rear in stone
The sweetness that all longed for night and day,
The gentleness none there had ever known;
But when the master's buried mice can play,
And maybe the great-grandson of that house,
For all its bronze and marble, 's but a mouse.

O what if gardens where the peacock strays
With delicate feet upon old terraces,
Or else all Juno from an urn displays
Before the indifferent garden deities;
O what if levelled lawns and gravelled ways
Where slippered Contemplation finds his ease
And Childhood a delight for every sense,
But take our greatness with our violence?

What if the glory of escutcheoned doors,
And buildings that a haughtier age designed,
The pacing to and fro on polished floors
Amid great chambers and long galleries, lined
With famous portraits of our ancestors;
What if those things the greatest of mankind
Consider most to magnify, or to bless,
But take our greatness with our bitterness?

--W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]To view the complete poem, click here.

An ancient bridge, and a more ancient tower,
A farmhouse that is sheltered by its wall,
An acre of stony ground,
Where the symbolic rose can break in flower,
Old ragged elms, old thorns innumerable,
The sound of the rain or sound
Of every wind that blows;
The stilted water-hen
Crossing stream again
Scared by the splashing of a dozen cows;

A winding stair, a chamber arched with stone,
A grey stone fireplace with an open hearth,
A candle and written page.Il Penseroso's Platonist toiled on
In some like chamber, shadowing forth
How the daemonic rage
Imagined everything.
Benighted travellers
From markets and from fairs
Have seen his midnight candle glimmering.

Two men have founded here. A man-at-arms
Gathered a score of horse and spent his days
In this tumultuous spot,
Where through long wars and sudden night alarms
His dwindling score and he seemed castaways
Forgetting and forgot;
And I, that after me
My bodily heirs may find,
To exalt a lonely mind,
Befitting emblems of adversity.

--W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]To view the complete poem, click here.

Friday, March 5, 2010

Two heavy trestles, and a board
Where Sato's gift, a changeless sword,
By pen and paper lies,
That it may moralise
My days out of their aimlessness.
A bit of an embroidered dress
Covers its wooden sheath.
Chaucer had not drawn breath
When it was forged. In Sato's house,
Curved like new moon, moon-luminous,
It lay five hundred years.
Yet if no change appears
No moon; only an aching heart
Conceives a changeless work of art.
Our learned men have urged
That when and where 'twas forged
A marvellous accomplishment,
In painting or in pottery, went
From father unto son
And through the centuries ran
And seemed unchanging like the sword.
Soul's beauty being most adored,
Men and their business took
The soul's unchanging look;
For the most rich inheritor,
Knowing that none could pass Heaven's door,
That loved inferior art,
Had such an aching heart
That he, although a country's talk
For silken clothes and stately walk.
Had waking wits; it seemed
Juno's peacock screamed.

--W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]To view the complete poem, click here.

Having inherited a vigorous mind
From my old fathers, I must nourish dreams
And leave a woman and a man behind
As vigorous of mind, and yet it seems
Life scarce can cast a fragrance on the wind,
Scarce spread a glory to the morning beams,
But the torn petals strew the garden plot;
And there's but common greenness after that.

And what if my descendants lose the flower
Through natural declension of the soul,
Through too much business with the passing hour,
Through too much play, or marriage with a fool?
May this laborious stair and this stark tower
Become a roofless ruin that the owl
May build in the cracked masonry and cry
Her desolation to the desolate sky.

The Primum Mobile that fashioned us
Has made the very owls in circles move;
And I, that count myself most prosperous,
Seeing that love and friendship are enough,
For an old neighbour's friendship chose the house
And decked and altered it for a girl's love,
And know whatever flourish and decline
These stones remain their monument and mine.

--W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]To view the complete poem, click here.

Wednesday, March 3, 2010

What manner of soul is his to whom high truth
Is but the plaything of a feverish hour,
A dangling ladder to the ghost of power!
Gone are the grandeurs of the world's iron youth,
When kings were mighty, being made by swords.
Now comes the transit age, the age of brass,
When clowns into the vacant empires pass,
Blinding the multitude with specious words.
To them faith, kinship, truth and verity,
Man's sacred rights and very holiest thing,
Are but the counters at a desperate play,
Flippant and reckless what the end may be,
So that they glitter, each his little day,
The little mimic of a vanished king.

In the dying days of February, inspired by an example I'd read on another blog, I rushed out a quick'n'dirty, Kindle-only version of "Betty." It went live on Amazon Digital Services this morning; the first version of "Betty" for sale.

Further information is in the blog Page I added today:

The first edition of "Betty" was published Mar. 2, 2010, for Kindle, and is sold through Amazon Digital Services. The publisher is listed as The Betty Blog. The inside text is simply "Betty" and "Betty's Appendix" as on the blog without any embellishments, while the cover image is the blog's rainbow logo on a plain white background, without even a name. The ASIN# is B003AKY742. It carries a list price of $6.95, which "includes international wireless delivery via Amazon Whispernet."
Order it here:http://www.amazon.com/dp/B003AKY742

Blog Pages are a new Blogger feature that allows up to 10 pages to stay permanently linked to the top of the home page, rather than disappear as new messages are added. My intent is to continue updating that new page as other editions of "Betty" become available.

Nature hath fixed in each man's life for dower
One root-like gift, one primal energy,
Wherefrom the soul takes growth, as grows a tree,
With sap and fibre, branch and leaf and flower;
But if this seed in its creative hour
Be crushed and stifled, only then the shell
Lifts like a phantom falsely visible,
Wherein is neither growth, nor joy, nor power.
Find thou this germ, and find thou thus thyself,
This one clear meaning of the deathless I,
This bent, this work, this duty -- for thereby
God numbers thee, and marks thee for his own:
Careless of hurt, or threat, or praise, or pelf,
Find it and follow it, this, and this alone!

Monday, March 1, 2010

VII. I See Phantoms of Hatred and of the Heart's Fullness and of the Coming Emptiness

I climb to the tower-top and lean upon broken stone,
A mist that is like blown snow is sweeping over all,
Valley, river, and elms, under the light of a moon
That seems unlike itself, that seems unchangeable,
A glittering sword out of the east. A puff of wind
And those white glimmering fragments of the mist sweep by.
Frenzies bewilder, reveries perturb the mind;
Monstrous familiar images swim to the mind's eye.

'Vengeance upon the murderers,' the cry goes up,
'Vengeance for Jacques Molay.' In cloud-pale rags, or in lace,
The rage-driven, rage-tormented, and rage-hungry troop,
Trooper belabouring trooper, biting at arm or at face,
Plunges towards nothing, arms and fingers spreading wide
For the embrace of nothing; and I, my wits astray
Because of all that senseless tumult, all but cried
For vengeance on the murderers of Jacques Molay.

Their legs long, delicate and slender, aquamarine their eyes,
Magical unicorns bear ladies on their backs.
The ladies close their musing eyes. No prophecies,
Remembered out of Babylonian almanacs,
Have closed the ladies' eyes, their minds are but a pool
Where even longing drowns under its own excess;
Nothing but stillness can remain when hearts are full
Of their own sweetness, bodies of their loveliness.

The cloud-pale unicorns, the eyes of aquamarine,
The quivering half-closed eyelids, the rags of cloud or of lace,
Or eyes that rage has brightened, arms it has made lean,
Give place to an indifferent multitude, give place
To brazen hawks. Nor self-delighting reverie,
Nor hate of what's to come, nor pity for what's gone,
Nothing but grip of claw, and the eye's complacency,
The innumerable clanging wings that have put out the moon.

I turn away and shut the door, and on the stair
Wonder how many times I could have proved my worth
In something that all others understand or share;
But O! ambitious heart, had such a proof drawn forth
A company of friends, a conscience set at ease,
It had but made us pine the more. The abstract joy,
The half-read wisdom of daemonic images,
Suffice the ageing man as once the growing boy.

--W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), 1923from The Cat and the Moon, and certain poems, 1924

[Poem is in the public domain in Canada and the European Union]To view the complete poem, click here.

"The Man With the Blue Guitar" by Wallace Stevens, which I'd planned to post on TBB during March and onto usenet during National Poetry Month in April, will not be appearing as planned. TMWtBG was slated to begin appearing on the blog March 1, immediately following Stevens's "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," which I'd begun posting here Feb. 1, that in turn following posting of a dozen of his shorter poems in January. I'd chosen Stevens for the first major poet to showcase here, as being the most famous 20th century poet whose works are in the public domain in Canada. (As Stevens died in 1955, his poetry entered the public domain here on January 1, 2006.)

I'd previously posted "Notes" on usenet during April, 2009, without controversy. Shortly after I began blogging it, though, I began receiving posts on one of the same usenet groups claiming Stevens' poems were still under copyright. So I checked and rechecked, and found that in the U.S. his poetry is still copyrighted until 2026.

I decided to finish posting "Notes", and leave the January poems on as well, while adding "Do not copy" notices for American (and European) readers. It is the position of this blog that, being administered in Canada, it is subject to Canadian law, and therefore has a right to print Stevens's poetry. I realize that position may be wrong in law, and that eventually these poems may have to be removed from the blog; but that was no reason to concede defeat without a fight and remove them all immediately.

At the same time, I have no desire to provoke a confrontation, so I'm foregoing posting any more Stevens for the nonce. "Blue Guitar" (unlike "Notes" and the shorter poems) can already be found and read on the Web, so there's no real value in archiving it here as well:

For now I'm reserving the right to publish more of Stevens, as well as other modern poets (such as Weldon Kees) who are in the public domain in Canada. However, my priority will be on finding pieces that are inarguably public domain in the U.S. and Britain as well. That means authors who died on or before 1939; the obvious name that date suggests is Yeats, and you can expect to see some of his poetry here this month.

I'll also be posting, over March, the five public-domain poems -- by Heine, Rimbaud, and Saint-Denys Garneau -- that I've translated to date.

UPDATE, June 2012: I have noticed a spike in traffic this month to this page (though not to TMWTBG itself), so I figured it would be a good idea to add a link here to the poem (which I eventually did post, a year later, in July 2011):